Driven by the needs from applications in both industry and other sciences, the field of
inverse problems has undergone a tremendous growth during the last two decades (Engl and
Kugler, 2003).
However, studies on inverse problems in structural mechanics can be traced back to as far as 1904 when Michell (1904) dealt with the optimum layout of a plane truss.
The work by Schmitt (1960) is frequently viewed as the start of modern structural optimization in the 1960’s when computer-aided structural analysis and numerical optimization techniques became accessible.
Though the studies on modern structural optimization has been undertaken for more than three decades, the terminology of inverse problems has not been widely used.